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Resolution on World
Hunger, 1968
General
Conference Mennonite Church
Hunger weakens the body, dulls the
mind, and kills the spirit
of those who suffer from it. The death toll
is too high when seven persons perish each minute from malnutrition and
starvation. One-third of the
children alive today will carry through life irreversible effects of
food deficiency. Each week a million
new babies are born and thus become that many more hungry mouths to
feed. Must one-third of
these too be doomed to poverty? Hunger is always tragic, but doubly so
in the face of deliberately
restricted food production and extravagant waste in North America.
Most General Conference people are
among the overfed, the
comfortably housed, and the generous
spenders. Whatever the explanation for finding ourselves among the
prosperous rather than the
hungry, it places a tremendous burden of Christian stewardship upon us.
The poor once
silently wasted away. Our hardness to the cries of hungry neighbors may
result in the resounding roar
of violence and revolution.
The Bible declares God's compassion
for the poor
(Deuteronomy 15, Isaiah 58, Luke 4). Our concern for the poor must be
generated by a desire to be
loving and not by a fear of violence. Christian compassion is rooted in
a deep belief that following
Christ means a special concern for the poor, the hungry, and the
hated.
We have responded to
emergencies with relief and we
have launched agricultural development programs overseas. More must now
be done. In the spirit of
the inter-Mennonite consultation on hunger and population held in
Chicago, May 1968, the following
actions seem appropriate:
- We urge our constituency to
study the causes of hunger
as a basis for
intelligently responding to the problem. We urge serious study of the
new missions education
materials in order that an informed compassion may motivate our
conference toward establishing a high priority in a crusade against
hunger.
- We encourage our church agencies,
including MCC, to
give higher priority to programs which combat hunger.
We must do more to increase food production and to teach skills leading
to self-help programs. We
must share our knowledge about family planning, so that newborn babies
may be looked upon as a
joyful blessing rather than an unendurable burden or even a curse.
- We ask individual members, our
congregations, and the
various church bodies, individually and
collectively, to encourage local, state, national, and
international agencies in new efforts to share
personnel, technical information, and food materials with the hungry.
- We call on our people and
especially our young, to
become competent in skills needed in the
campaign against hunger and to offer their vocational skills
to agencies sponsored by the church, by
private enterprise, and by our governments, engaged in the battle
against hunger and poverty.
- We urge individuals, families,
congregations, and
organizations in our brotherhood to consider
making radical adjustments in personal and corporate styles of living
and spending. We urge all
members to devoutly pray that God will give us guidance in faithful
stewardship over our material
abundance. May God help us so that we may be faithful in our response
to the poor in God's world.
Adopted
by the General Conference Mennonite Church in 1968
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